Taking Inequality Personally
posted by Frank Pasquale
The Washington Times has accused Barbara Ehrenreich of being a Marxist for her work exposing the effects of inequality in the US. (Maybe they bought into that scurrilous Facebook app “What German Philosopher is She“?) I wonder if intellectuals’ attitudes toward inequality are rooted in encounters like these:
In the first meeting of my first seminar of my first year, [real-estate developer Charles] Kushner’s son Jared entered my classroom and promptly took the seat across from mine, sharing the room, so to speak. I was drawing an annual salary of $15,500 and borrowing the remainder for survival in Cambridge, in order that he might be given the best possible education. [About 5 years later] Jared . . . purchased The New York Observer for $10 million, part of which he made buying and selling real estate while also attending my seminar. As publisher, one of his first moves was to reduce pay for the Observer‘s stable of book reviewers. I had been writing reviews for the Observer in an effort to pay my debts.
I guess somebody isn’t going to be supporting estate tax repeal.
July 23, 2008 at 9:37 pm
Posted in: Law and Inequality
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Responses (11)
Orin Kerr - July 24, 2008 at 12:30 am
I recently read Ehrenreich’s 1969 book, “Long March, Short Spring — the Student Uprising at Home and Abroad. Not only was she pretty heavily Marxist in her writing back then, but her attitude toward inequality was based on experiences like how the Columbia University faculty oppressed Columbia undergraduates in ’68 by objecting when they took over university buildings, barricades the doors, and held faculty members as hostages. Ivy League college students taking faculty members hostages was really speaking truth to power, as she tells it.
Given that she seemed pretty Marxist back in 1969, I would doubt that it was her classroom experience decades later when she had become a faculty member herself so much influenced her views.
Paul Gowder - July 24, 2008 at 1:58 am
Someone remind me again why being a Marxist is supposed to be discreditable?
Orin Kerr - July 24, 2008 at 3:53 am
Paul,
Beling a Marxist is a lot like believing George W. Bush is the greatest President in American history. Most people will think you’re out of touch, because they think all the evidence is to the contrary. On the other hand, there are pockets of true believers who insist the doubters are the ones who just don’t get it. As a result, whether it’s discreditable depends on which crowd you have in mind.
TRE - July 24, 2008 at 4:01 am
As we all learned from the Salem Witch Trials, there is no such thing as a Marxist.
Seth Finkelstein - July 24, 2008 at 6:17 am
@Orin Kerr – you’re conflating two different people mentioned in the post. The classroom story is by someone else, not Barbara Ehrenreich.
And the full sentence is “Twenty years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote an article for the New York Times in which she pointed out the growing inequality of American society and was promptly denounced, by a rival paper, as a Marxist.”
@Paul Gowder – “Marxist” is a code-word/slur meaning something like “this person is such a left-wing nut they should be dismissed immediately on general principles because we all know liberalism is wrong and Libertarianism is right”.
Orin Kerr - July 24, 2008 at 6:59 am
Seth, you’re absolutely right; thanks for the correction.
Although your description of how people use the world Marxist seems a bit off, I think. For the most part, people use “Marxist” as a term to mean a socialist, in my experience; given how few libertarians there are, your definiion seems particularly unlikely.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - July 24, 2008 at 8:44 am
Orin,
Perhaps you would agree that “most people” have not a clue about what the bulk of Marx’s writings are about. Few, for instance, have little appreciation for the fact that Marx wrote (for better and worse) comparatively little about what he understood by both socialism and communism.
FWIW: Part of my worldview is unabashedly Marxist. As to the sense in which I’m a Marxist, it closely tracks the closing words from Jon Elster’s indispensable study, Making Sense of Marx (1985):
“It is not possible today, morally or intellectually, to be a Marxist in the traditional sense. This would be someone who accepted all or most of the views that Marx held to be true and important–scientific socialism, the labour theory of value or the theory of falling rate of profit [I see things a bit differently than Elster on these two items], together with other and more defensible views. But, speaking now for myself only, I believe it is still possible to be a Marxist in a rather different sense of the term. I find that most of the views that *I* hold to be true and important, I can trace back to Marx. This includes methodology, substantive theories and, above all, values. The critique of exploitation and alienation remains central. A better society would be one that allowed all human beings to do what only human beings can do–to create, to invent, to imagine other worlds.” (Elster, p. 531).
Indeed, in the spirit of the above, I find myself drawn to the “Marxist conception of the good life,” at least as spelled out by Elster in his brilliant essay, “Self-Realisation in Work and Politics: The Marxist Conception of the Good Life,” in Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene, eds., Alternatives to Capitalism, 1989: 127-158.
Finally, and incidentally, I’ve put together fairly short and select bibliography on Marx and Marxism (secondary literature) should anyone be interested in widening and deepening their knowledge in this area.
Joseph Slater - July 24, 2008 at 9:53 am
It is a darn shame that anyone who expresses concern over the societal effects of significantly increasing disparities in wealth and income, or anyone who argues that economic class can be an important explanatory factor in political and social movements gets labeled a “Marxist” by some on the right. The point, obviously, is to dimiss the critiques without consideration because the critic is somewhere on a scale ranging from “out of touch” to “believing things that caused Stalin and Mao’s atrocities.”
There is, of course, a fine tradition of socialism/social democracy that has always been independent of and highly critical of Soviet-style communism. And some of that was based in some of Marx’s ideas. I wouldn’t call myself a “Marxist” for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to the facts that (i) he was wrong about some important things; (ii) horrible folks have used and misused some of his ideas with tragic consequences; and (iii) I’m not comfortable with being an “ist” for anybody — I would prefer to evaluate and critique ideas without worrying about whether I was being faithful to the notions of some individual long gone. But some of Marx’s ideas were accurate (to Patrick’s list I’ll add the notion that economic class is important in ideological formation and in understanding history and society generally), and some of his ideas spurred other movements and thinkers that have had positive effects.
Barbara E.’s intellectual roots come partly from that non-communist socialist tradition, partly from some ideas developed during and in reaction to the new left (e.g., feminism, trying to understand how class worked in modern American society), but much is her own invention. Her works speak for themselves, and should be evaluated without recourse to labels meant to be insulting and dismissive.
To the extent she is trying to call our attention to the depressingly enormous gaps in wealth and income and the negative effects those gaps have in society, more power to her. Let’s listen to her arguments and evaluate them on their own merits.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - July 24, 2008 at 10:17 am
It’s always refreshing to hear Joseph’s voice of sanity and reason.
As to the literature on classes, and by way of backing up his point about the ideological function of economic class(es), among other things, I’ll be so bold as to suggest one read the works of Erik Olin Wright for a contemporary Marxist take on the topic.
Orin Kerr - July 24, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Patrick,
I agree that most people don’t understand what the bulk of Marx’s writing were about. Indeed, this is probably true about the work of every major thinker/writer, whether it is Marx or Hayek or Adam Smith.
I do think there is a modern understanding of what Marxism is that is based on what self-described Marxists claim to believe; much like with Burkean conservatism, the set of beliefs is often that of self-described followers centuries later than with the original.
Dave - July 24, 2008 at 2:22 pm
As an unabashed capitalist (and a once youthful Marxist) who recognizes the contributions of Marx to the social sciences, I am in full agreement with Patrick. It is unfortunate that the term Marxist has come to mean a state just short of stupidity. But it should be noted that it is the Marxists themselves who created that problem by taking a few concepts and turning them into a century and a half of nightmares. Today, the failure of the vast majority of “Marxist” systems (meaning those that involved some greater degree of state control of property and markets than basic liberal taxation and regulation) is clear, and we are not just talking about Stalin and Mao. Even Marxist-lite social theories and movements such as dependency theory and import substitution industrialization have proved to have disastrous consequences for the same workers they proposed to serve. It’s no wonder that the world has a distate for Marxism, and it is the Marxists that are to blame. Perhaps the time has come for those who would critique modern liberal capitalism to a) find a set of policy recommendations that does not involve drastic incursions on private ownership and free markets, and b) find a new seminal thinker upon whose ideas this new critique would be based, since “Marx” has outlived any usefulness it may have once had.
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